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Ready for SandyBridge, ASRock has roped in gaming brand Fatal1ty for this high-end board. Its LGA 1155 socket will accept any of the new generation i3, i5, i7 CPUs.

Intel’s P67 chipset shouldn’t be glossed over, though. It sports a native SATA 6GB/s controller and DMI2, which doubles the bandwidth available for communication between the CPU and the rest of the system. It also lets manufacturers do away with ancient BIOS interface- More on that later.

The P67 Professional has four DIMM sockets supporting 32GB of DDR3, and six of its ten SATA sockets are of the 6Gb/s variety. There are three PCI express x16 slots; with 2 graphics cards both will run at x8 while the third slot runs at x4.

The bottom of the board offers a USB 3 header, four USB 2 connectors and a floppy disk header, plus power and audio plugs. Enthusiast will appreciate power and reset button and the two-character POST display. There are plenty of fan connectors, with sic in total and two with pulse-width modulation (PWM)

It’s cramped but ASRock has kept things usable: a clear CMOS button makes up for the fact that the CMOS battery is slotted between sockets, and ASRocks has include LGA 775 mounting holes alongside its LGA 1155 mooring so you can still use your old CPU cooler. There are brackets In the box of extra USB 3 ports and a 2.5 in SSD too. One of the board’s most interesting feature is its UEFI GUI, which replaces the BIOS. More support and clear boot options make it easy to use even if there isn’t much genuinely new power.

Specs:

ATX motherboard

Intel P67 chipset

LGA 1155 socket

Up to 32GB DDR3 RAM

6x SATA 6Gb/s

4xUSB3

4xUSB2

3x PCI-E x16

2x PCI-E x1

2x PCI

Given all that’s on offer here, and the fact it’s among the first SandyBridge boards to market, we expected the p67 professionals to cost a lot of money but the pricing is actually reasonable. This ultra cool motherboard is priced at somewhat 250$.